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CS276 Lecture 26 (draft)

After showing that last week’s protocol for quadratic residuosity is indeed zero-knowledge, we move on to the formal definition of proof of knowledge, and we show that the quadratic residuosity protocol is also a proof of knowledge.

1. The Quadratic Residuosity Protocol

Last time we considered the following protocol for quadratic residuosity:

Verifier’s input: an integer (product of two unknown odd primes) and a integer ;

Prover’s input: and a square root such that .

The prover picks a random and sends to the verifier

The verifier picks at random and sends to the prover

The prover sends back if or if

The verifier cheks that if or that if , and accepts if so.

Today we show that it is zero knowledge, that is,

Theorem 1 For every verifier algorithm of complexity there is a simulator algorithm of average complexity such that for every odd composite , every which is a quadratic residue and every square root of of , the distributions

and

are identical.

2. Proofs of Knowledge

Suppose that is a language in NP; then there is an NP relation computable in polynomial time and polynomial such that if and only if there exists a witness such that (where we use to denote the length of a bit-string ) and .

Recall the definition of soundness of a proof system for : we say that the proof system has soundness error at most if for every and for every cheating prover strategy the probability that accepts is at most . Equivalently, if there is a prover strategy such that the probability that accepts is bigger than , then it must be the case that . This captures the fact that if the verifier accepts then it has high confidence that indeed .

In a proof-of-knowledge, the prover is trying to do more than convince the verifier that a witness exists proving ; he wants to convince the verifier that he (the prover) knows a witness such that . How can we capture the notion that an algorithm “knows” something?

Definition 2 (Proof of Knowledge) A proof system for an NP relation is a proof of knowledge with knowledge error at most and extractor slowdown if there is an algorithm (called a knowledge extractor) such that, for every verifier strategy of complexity and every input , if

then outputs a such that in average time at most

In the definition, giving as an input to means to give the code of to . A stronger definition, which is satisfied by all the proof systems we shall see, is to let be an oracle algorithm of complexity , and allow to have oracle access to . In such a case, “oracle access to a verifier strategy” means that is allowed to select the randomness used by , to fix an initial part of the interaction, and then obtain as an answer what the next response from would be given the randomness and the initial interaction.

Theorem 3 The protocol for quadratic residuosity of the previous section is a proof of knowledge with knowledge error and extractor slowdown 2.